The staff at NobodyisFlyingthePlane would like to see if the promises of candidate Clinton will be kept by President C, should she be elected.

Her words seem to be what we need. Her summary of financial reforms speaks volumes.

The proper role of Wall Street is to help Main Street grow and prosper. When our financial sector works the right way, it helps families buy their first homes, entrepreneurs start and grow small businesses and hardworking Americans save for retirement. Rather than pursuing the kind of high-stakes speculation that devastated our economy before, Wall Street should focus on building an economy that creates good-paying jobs, rising incomes and sound investments so that more families can achieve the security of a middle-class life.

Economic insight and reflections on the Great Recession from England’s former Prime Minister:

Already, we have forgotten the basic lesson of the crash: Global problems need global solutions. And because we failed to learn from the last crisis, the world’s bankers are carrying us toward the next one.

most of the problems that caused the 2008 crisis — excessive borrowing, shadow banking and reckless lending — have not gone away. Too-big-to-fail banks have not shrunk; they’ve grown bigger. Huge bonuses that encourage reckless risk-taking by bankers remain the norm. Meanwhile, shadow banking — investment and lending services by financial institutions that act like banks, but with less supervision — has expanded in value to $71 trillion, from $59 trillion in 2008.

Brown’s summary is right on.

In short, precisely what world leaders sought to avoid — a global financial free-for-all, enabled by ad hoc, unilateral actions — is what has happened. Political expediency, a failure to think and act globally, and a lack of courage to take on vested interests are pushing us inexorably toward the next crash.

The market perception that some financial institutions are “too big to fail” is alive and well. If you want to remove that perception, you need to break up our biggest banks.

creditors still believe that the government stands behind very large bank holding companies and other big financial companies.

In effect, the government is providing a form of insurance that encourages financial institutions to become even bigger — and thus even more likely to be protected by some combination of the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and other agencies. This is an unfair, nontransparent government subsidy that encourages excessive risk-taking and creates a very large potential downside for the nonfinancial side of our economy.

When the choice is between global calamity on the one hand and unpalatable, unpopular and perhaps even illegal support for big banks on the other hand, these officials expect to go with the bailout.

Prominent figures on Wall Street fought fiercely against the broad contours of financial reform legislation in 2009-10 and fight now on every line of every detailed regulation; their estimated 3,000 to 5,000 lawyers and lobbyists work very hard and earn a great deal of money for a reason.

We need to have a credible commitment to let any financial institution fail — in the sense that it will go out of business, wiping out shareholders and imposing losses on creditors.

But any promise for global megabanks that we would “just let them fail” is completely hollow. Standard or even modified bankruptcy procedures are not a credible threat because of the damage this would cause to other financial institutions and to confidence around the world.

Make banks and other financial institutions small enough and simple enough to fail — this is the point stressed by Messrs. Fisher and Rosenblum.

As Mr. Haldane documents, when measured properly, there are no economies of scale for banks over $100 billion in total assets. As a society, we are not losing anything by imposing a size cap on our largest banks, which currently have assets in excess of $2 trillion. Of course, there are private benefits that are being lost — meaning lower subsidies for large financial firms and the powerful people who run them.

How do you look at the sub prime mess and blame it on the people who took loans they never should have?

I’ll tell you how. Failure to see the bigger picture.

This failure underpins our pilot-less plane phenomenon. Start with home owners accepting some responsibility. More importantly this article points to the systemic problem created by banks and mortgage companies. We have to acknowledge their role in our current economic problems. We also have to recognize their culpability for fraudulent loan activity.

It’s very easy to point fingers at the low income home owner who got duped by the bank. Why has it taken so long to hold the responsible parties accountable for their widespread fraudulent practices. The homeowners are certainly being punished. Conservatives might want you to believe that a whole bunch of undeserving poor folk got free rides and homes they didn’t deserve, but I’m sure the vast majority of people at all income levels who took those bad loans are suffering the consequences. Now perhaps one of the many true perpetrators of this fraud will be held accountable and punished.

We are so quick to pillory a guilty individual. Why are we so reluctant to hold corporations accountable for their crimes?